I don't think the author is referring to video games specifically geared towards education. If anything, real video games, especially social multiplayer ones, provide complex environments to learn from, and sufficiently open-ended games reward innovation and creativity, while also encouraging gamers to reverse engineer game dynamics.

For example, I learned the ideas behind "merchanting" (i.e. arbitrage and price discovery) at a young age through Runescape, where some time and patience could leverage capital to buy small amount of coal from casual gamers on less populated servers and sell large amounts on busy servers at a 50% markup.